Understanding Social Analytics for your Business

Your social media may be filled with clever captions, eye-catching photos, and well-written bios, but are you tracking the right social analytics? The answer to this question will ultimately guide your social strategy moving forward and determine how much you are actually gaining from your social media marketing efforts.

What Are Social Analytics and Why Do They Matter?

Every form of engagement with your social media platform can be measured and tracked. This type of data gives you insight into how well your social media posts are performing, which allows you to create and reach specific goals on social media.

By paying attention to social media analytics and making changes to your strategy based on what you see, you can grow your business further using social media marketing.

How to Access Social Analytics

Every social media platform has its own way for you to track analytics. To make tracking social analytics easier, you can find a social media analytics tool that works for your budget and makes sense for your business model. This will allow you to compile data from each profile into one place. Using this type of tool will also help you visualize important data using graphs and automated presentations as well.

Tracking Engagement

One of the most important categories of analytics to track for social media marketing is engagement. This is a blanket term that refers to how your users are interacting with your posts. It’s very possible your social media platforms could gain a decent following, but that won’t do much good without quality engagement.

You’ll want to take a look at pieces of data such as likes, comments, and shares. High numbers of each mean users find your content compelling and worth the pause in their scrolling.

While you can get a quick sense of your engagement by noticing how many likes your posts get, what isn’t clearly visible is your post engagement rate. This is the number of engagements divided by the number of impressions. This is a truer metric of actual post quality since it tells you the percentage of users who see your posts and decide to stop and interact with them.

Tracking Brand Awareness

Having high brand awareness is a strong sign of growth and healthy longevity for your business. You can track the strength of your brand by looking at social analytics like reach and impressions. The number of impressions your social media posts get tells you how many people are actually viewing your profiles. Whether or not these users have decided to follow your pages, this tells you more people are being exposed to your brand. Your reach is similar but broader, and is measured by the number of followers you have plus the number of followers of users who have shared your content.

Boosing Your ROI

As you track your social analytics and finely tune your social media strategy, you’ll find your social media platforms earning you a better ROI. One of the best social analytics to track to see if your goals are being met is your conversion rate, which tells you how many users make a purchase directly from your social accounts. Also important is your referral rate, a metric that tells you the number of visitors who got to your website directly from your social media accounts.

As you dive into your social analytics and carefully use them to guide and improve your marketing strategy, you’ll be able to watch your sales grow.